Category Archives: Tragic

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Disney is already one of the biggest media companies around, and it’s now set to become even bigger. The company announced late today that it’s acquiring Lucasfilm Ltd., currently 100 percent owned by founder George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in a cash and stock deal. That of course includes the rights to both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises, as well as Lucasfilm properties like Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. What’s more, the press release announcing the deal also confirmed that Disney is now targeting 2015 for a release of Star Wars: Episode 7, and that its “long term plan is to release a new Star Wars feature film every two to three years.” No word yet on a proper release of the original, original trilogy.

It’s a story that we hoped we’d never have to report. Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on Earth’s Moon, has died at the age of 82 after complications from heart surgery three weeks earlier. His greatest accomplishment very nearly speaks for itself — along with help from fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, he changed the landscape of space exploration through a set of footprints. It’s still important to stress his accomplishments both before and after the historic Apollo 11 flight, though. He was instrumental to the Gemini and X-series test programs in the years before Apollo, and followed his moonshot with roles in teaching aerospace engineering as well as investigating the Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Challenger incidents. What more can we say? Although he only spent a very small portion of his life beyond Earth’s atmosphere, he’s still widely considered the greatest space hero in the US, if not the world, and inspired a whole generation of astronauts. We’ll miss him.

A gunman opened fire early today at a screening of the new Batman movie in an Aurora, Colorado, theater. “We saw people running around and screaming,” a man told CNN affiliate KUSA. A suspect is in custody, police say.

What the hell, Russia? China, you too?! You’d rather see people being massacred… North Korea anyone? Sheesh…

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Russia and China again vetoed a Western-backed U.N. resolution Thursday threatening sanctions against President Bashar Assad’s government if it didn’t stop using heavy weapons in the escalating 16-month conflict.

If for some reason you still don’t think that texting while driving is a bad idea, here’s a story for you. Aaron Deveau, age 17, was allegedly composing a text message when his car crossed the center line of a Massachusetts street, hitting a car head-on. In that car was Daniel Bowley, Jr. and his girlfriend, Luz Roman. Bowley Jr. suffered massive injuries in the crash, and after spending 18 days in a Boston hospital, died as a result of the injuries.

According to Boston.com, a Haverhill, Massachusetts judge sentenced Deveau to “concurrent sentences of two and a half years on a charge of motor vehicle homicide and two years for a charge of negligent operation of a motor vehicle causing serious injury while texting” earlier this week.

After noting Deveau’s age and lack of any criminal record, the judge later ordered the 17-year-old to serve one year in the Essex County House of Corrections, suspending the other sentences. Deveau was originally arrested in 2011, following the crash that took place in February of that year.

“If I could take it back, I would take it back. I just want to apologize to the family,” Deveau stated during the trial. During his testimony, Deveau reportedly claimed that he was not texting during the time of the crash and could not recall texting while driving.

Luz Roman (pictured above), who survived the crash, spoke out during the hearings, and spoke to Boston.com after the sentencing, which you can see in the video below. “This has been giving me a lot of pain, there are no words to describe,” Roman told Boston.com. Scroll downfor the rest of her commentary, as well as some thoughts from Bowley’s son.

Ray Bradbury, the American author of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, died today. He was 91 years old.

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, and he spent part of his teen years in Los Angeles, where he graduated high school. He got a start in publishing as a newspaper hawker, and in 1943 he became a full-time writer. Bradbury’s first published works consisted of short stories, a form he would master over the course of his career. The prolific writer also wrote novels, essays, plays, teleplays, and poetry.

Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles was his first big break in science fiction publishing. The series of short stories told tales of Earth’s inhabitants colonizing the planet Mars, and Bradbury collected them into a single work. He also sold The Illustrated Man at the same time as The Martian Chronicles; both works brought him commercial success. In 1953, Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451. The book’s vision of a totalitarian state that burns books proved to be a provocative ideological work that evoked strong memories of Nazi Germany during World War II and pitted a strong ideology of freedom of ideas against totalitarian regimes.